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As some of the most stable and important structures in society, colleges and universities are rarely described as nimble. Yet, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, institutions across the globe not only shifted within days to online instruction, but many academic researchers also immediately launched efforts to understand the virus, identify treatments, produce medical supplies, and study its impacts. While some investigators managed to make progress, other talented researchers lacked timely access to funding for key personnel, lab supplies, and incentives for study participants--the needed fuel for discoveries. Even as researchers have long called for low-barrier processes to accelerate time-sensitive research contributions, the pandemic has painfully underscored the need for rapid responses to pressing societal needs. Experimental programs offer models of the funding mechanisms needed to heighten efficiency, whether in the face of COVID or other ongoing crises. In this article, the authors discuss the shortcomings of the current, widely used peer review process and suggest that Mcubed, a novel token-based review and funding program developed at the University of Michigan (U-M), may offer significant advantages. This article describes the operation of Mcubed over an 8-year period on U-M's three campuses and details the positive results that were obtained, hoping to motivate others to engage in comparable endeavours.

Many engineering courses rely on in-person lectures and textbooks for content delivery, with homework sets and exams for evaluating and reinforcing student progress. Yet some research studies have shown that exams--high-pressure, time-limited assessments--are detrimental to the learning process and unnecessarily increase students' stress. We describe a new student-centered teaching approach based on four pedagogical domains: scaffolded, universally-designed, mastery-based, and gameful learning. The approach was implemented in an engineering course by first chunking the content into small, easily digestible topics. Next, multiple modalities were used to deliver this content, including textbook references, virtual lectures, condensed presentation slides, summary sheets, and two-minute videos. Finally, the typical grading system was replaced by a point system using multiple 10- and 20-point quizzes, all of which could be attempted multiple times through unique versions for each student. Several findings emerged from our examination of this overall instructional strategy. The flexibility in learning and assessment enhanced students' mastery of content and maximized their sense of ownership in the learning process. The multiple attempts on quizzes provided the students with more freedom to fail and resulted in a more supportive learning environment. Last, the multimodal delivery and self-controlled assessment process promoted inclusive and equitable learning. This course structure can be translated to many other engineering courses, with spreadsheets and a web-based quiz making program developed to assist in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]